As you probably don’t remember, I posted last summer about revisiting Vermont College of Fine Arts, the finest grad school in all the land, for an alumni mini-residency.  This January finds me back there again as a graduate assistant–aka, grad ass.  (Don’t you love a place that officially refers to its volunteers and employees with profanity?  I’m not always a fan of the profane, but something about grad assishness really does it for me.)

At some point, I’ll take a picture of the view from my window and talk in general terms about everything I’m learning (general terms because it’s all peoples’ intellectual property), but here’s what I will say about being back at a place you haven’t visited for a year and a half–ie, the dorms: what’s hitting me most is the recovered memories of sound.

People say smell is the most evocative sense, but at least this time around, I’m getting yanked through the rabbit hole from hearing room doors slam shut.  No one’s doing any bitter slamming–au contraire, people are just brimming with joy to be here–but these doors are for some reason just very loud and thunky and like nothing else I’ve ever heard.  A low, rumbly pitch.  And, doing double duty in the sound category are the clinking keys.  Is it something in the metal?  The one-two combination of round and square?  The particular molecularity of the plastic keyring?  Whatever it is, the key rings sound distinctive, too.  I hadn’t remembered either of these sounds, particularly, but I now realize that if you played me a tape of them, I would bolt upright and go, “Dewey Dorms!  Vermont College!”

And, you know, being a writer, it’s impossible to let any of this go by unmetaphorized, so I will note that I think there’s something symbolic in all this: keys to let you back in to a place you left, doors to rooms whose shape you knew but which are filled with new people and things.  I partly won my gal on our first date with my description of the recursive–progressing onward while looking back–and I think there’s something recursive about entering a room.  It will always be the same and different from the room you just left, because even if nothing else is moved in your absence, you are moved; you are different.

Of course, if the main sense-memory of this journey were, say, stewed beef tips, I would probably make something of that, too.  But I don’t want to think about stewed tips, so I’m going to end on this happy Stephen Sondheim song, “Opening Doors.”  (It’s about a composer, lyricist and novelist developing their careers.  Omg, resonance everywhere!)

And the lyrics, too.